With mare’s-tails spread all over the sky and a circumzenithal arc showing off the ice crystals in the upper atmosphere… I think the recent warm weather might be coming to an end. Still, that’s an English June for you.
This is the retaining wall for Keighley Road and some thirty feet high at this point, so this foxglove is a tenacious little bugger. They’re good at getting into crevices, I have noticed: various walls sprout them at the moment like purple nose hairs. Not a romantic simile I know but what the hell.
Today was one of those days where I could take advantage of the fact that my job often requires me simply to read things, in this case a draft PhD thesis; so into the pack it went, and out into the country I went. No thanks to the local train service, but that’s another story. The thesis was read. Well, about two-thirds of it anyway.
A random bird shot yes, but point 1) — you really don’t see many jays, generally and point 2) you certainly don’t see many of them within 15 yards of Oxford Road, the A34, in the absolute midst of the UoM campus. Perhaps now and again we do something right.
And point 3). How did jays end up with quite such specific colouring? Who said, evolution-wise — OK, what you guys really need, to successfully reproduce, is that blue-and-white ‘policeman’s helmet’ style band? I’m sure evolution was the agent — really, I’m a Darwinist — but what drove it?
With the closure of the Contact Theatre cafe, adjacent to my office, for all of 2018, Café Muse (at the Manchester Museum) has become the nicest place nearby to buy a lunch. I like this back room, with its tiles and incongruous porthole-style windows. A cool spot to hang out as the tropical weather continues.
Today was even more uneventful than yesterday, but I have been doing stuff, starting by sorting out all my season’s football programmes. There are some games missing here, either because there was no programme available or I lost or didn’t buy one, but the 31 in view here give a nice cultural cross-section of my movements over the last 11 months despite the lack of any real photographic quality. Although it will always bug me that I got the Leeds and Hassocks ones the wrong way round.
A wholly uneventful weekend. These were not even my cocktails.
A year ago today I was in Siberia and Britain was having its latest inconclusive and pointless electoral spasm. But early June 2018 is a highly uneventful time. With a cloudy day spent working at home I came as close as I have in any of these last 2,479 days to having nothing to photograph, and that’s eventually how this blog will end: there simply will be nothing more to say. Maybe this one doesn’t say much… but it is, at least, something.
The weather doesn’t show any real signs of getting crappier. Expect hosepipe bans by the end of the month, at this rate. These two jackdaws had found a shady spot to shelter and wonder what the strange human was pointing at them from across the road.
Two LCD Soundsystem gigs in a year… But being brilliant and versatile, they could play a whole different set than last time in London. No one is ever going to do high-quality gig photography from the next-to-back row high up in the circle and with my camera: but it’ll do to document the evening. James Murphy is a master lyricist (“Drunk girls know that love is an astronaut… it comes back, but it’s never the same”) and superb front man yet always remains a slightly chubby, unshaven fortysomething in yesterday’s T-shirt. Which is why we love him.
Being 42 